Conferences
The following sections are very much brief, personal overviews of my experiences at four conferences I have attended and at which I have presented. Not only have I engaged with the course content, but actively sought to further my interests and my own confidence by immersing myself in academic culture. ULAB2016 I spent my 21st birthday on a train to Aberdeen, embarking upon my first trip away for conference. The conference was hosted by the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain (ULAB) and served as a space for linguists to present their undergraduate work to other linguists. I had never presented before; I had no idea if my voice would desert me, or if I would simply burst into tears before it had chance to. Neither of those things happened, and my talk went smoothly, and suddenly I realised this is for me. A friend even mentioned how this was the most he had seen me laugh. I presented my second-year sociolinguistics project on workplace interaction, titled "'Let's have a phenomenal day!' Investigating the role of relational work at work at work" in which I used CA as a means of analysing relational work between managers and employees – to the mutual benefit of each. For this project, I was able to combine my academic interests with my part time job as a sales advisor, as my manager allowed me to use his store as a source of data. My manager had always been interested in what I was studying, and would often ask my opinions on certain interpersonal aspects of working for the company. LIAR IV What began as my sociolinguistics project went on to become a co-authored conference paper at the Linguistic Impoliteness, Aggression and Rudeness conference in Manchester in July 2016. Here, along with Andrew Merrison, I presented a talk titled "Cultivating camaraderie in the workplace: analysing the relational work at work at work when managers manage managing rapport". This time, my audience was not made up of undergraduates, but of professionals, experienced academics, and authors of papers I had read. This made it all the more rewarding when those same people came to discuss my talk with me over lunch. A few weeks after presenting, Andrew and I received an e-mail from some of the organisers of LIAR IV inviting us to submit our paper for a special edition Journal of Politeness Research. If all goes well, Attwood and Merrison (2018) will be my first (co-authored) publication. iMean5 More recently, in April 2017, Andrew and I co-authored another conference presentation titled "''Okay, what comes after that?' '''Investigating ‘nth-position (subsequent) action’ in workplace talk from socio-pragmatic and conversation analytic perspectives (because 1 + 1 > 2)". At this point, we really began to engage with the idea that CA and socio-pragmatics can be informed by one another. In any piece of work I have written within the past two years, I have always questioned "what is my punchline?". And the punchline for our talk was very much that CA and socio-pragmatics should not be kept as separate islands from each other, what with CA's emphasis on sequential organisation and socio-pragmatics' emphasis on context. ULAB2017 I spent my 22nd birthday on a train again, but to Cambridge this time. And no longer was I presenting a talk on workplace interaction. This time, I was presenting my dissertation on autism and (mis)understanding, titled "It takes two to (mis)understand: A conversation analytic investigation into autistic interaction". It felt odd to be standing at the front talking through my definitions and not mentioning politeness or face, but what I am starting to develop is an ability to do more than just one thing at a time – an important skill to hone as an academic, ''and as a social being.